The Beautiful Child, By Emma Tennant

Readers in search of a smart fright this Christmas should devour Emma Tennant's cunning, moody and bone-chilling new story inspired by "The Turn of the Screw", by the shadowy life of Henry James - and the nature of fiction itself, as a kind of haunting.

At Lamb House in Rye, a troubled James scholar investigates the Master's unfinished story of 1902, "The Beautiful Child".

Via flashbacks to James's time and the secretaries who took dictation from him - his "ghost writers", if you like - a sinister tale of spoilt childhood emerges.